Building Your First Content Calendar

A content calendar is a resource that marketing teams use and collaborate on to plan all content marketing activity. The calendar layout is a more effective and organized way of planning content because you can visualize how your content is distributed throughout the year, as opposed to if you were just to have a list of content to be published. Content calendars allow you to plan content around special events in your industry or important dates, see where you are missing content in your plan, and make sure you have an abundance of content ready to publish at the appropriate time.

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There’s some freedom in how you choose to set up your content calendar. You can set it up on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis depending on how fast or slow paced your industry moves. Because your entire marketing team should have access to this calendar, it allows for everyone to be on the same page and collaborate effectively.

Content calendars allow you to plan ahead and organize in an efficient manner. In actively using content calendars, you are saving time. Of course time is money, so this is nothing but beneficial for your company. This specifically saves time for your marketing director because instead of having to extensively research what people are talking about in regard to their company, they can see what people are talking about and what keywords are most frequently used when people are talking about their company.

A content calendar is considered to be a shareable resource that any marketing team can use to plan all of their content marketing activity. One of the benefits of using the calendar format, rather than just using a long list, is that you can visualize the content and its distribution throughout time. This allows you to:

A brand will rarely be publishing content to only a single audience. Most businesses and organizations have several groups of stakeholders or customer types, each of which are interested in different kinds of content.

Take stock of your content assets

It’s usually not necessary to produce all your content from nothing. Most businesses and organizations will have valuable and previously unexploited stocks of content assets just lying around waiting for an ingenious marketer to dust them off.

Schedule, publish, promote, track, and tweak your content

Regular editorial planning meetings between all those involved in content creation should be scheduled well before the next publishing period – be it monthly or quarterly. This meetings can be used to schedule the publishing content from your repository with realistic time frames and to support social media activity, email newsletter inclusions, etc.